


A Darkness; One of Many

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Kid Fic, Kidlock, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:38:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes is the lone survivor of the man Jack, a ruthless killer who had never lost sight of a victim- until his encounter with a baby who could barely stand yet still somehow managed to evade both his cunning and his knife. Now, Sherlock lives in a graveyard, raised by ghosts and other, less easily distinguishable creatures. He enjoys his new life; learning the alphabet and numbers through the inscriptions on tombstones; being cared for Mrs. Hudson, the ghost who found the odd boy, wet from the dewy grass; thriving under the tutelage of Mycroft, the mysterious guardian of the cemetery. And John, the only other member of the living he knows, certainly the only person who observes, looking closely enough to see the shadowy boy in the graveyard that all others have overlooked. But with this isolation and invisibility comes ignorance and all its consequences. Sherlock does not know the story behind his life here, that the murderer was never caught, that after his visit to that lonely, opulent house, he disappeared for years, and that, now, a new string of serial suicides have swept through London. And no one, no one but Jack himself, knows that it's not a man who failed to kill Sherlock all those years ago, but a boy...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Darkness; One of Many

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure if I actually have to credit Doyle or Moffat or anyone, really, for these characters, since Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain and this one time this lady who was like the trophy wife of the great-great-great-great-great whatever grand nephew of Arthur Conan Doyle tried to sue Moffat/Gattiss for using the character without her permission and utterly, completely, and, best of all, spectacularly, lost. Neil Gaiman, however, is a different matter. 
> 
> Some Notes in Case Neil Gaiman is Reading this Lone Little Fanfic:
> 
> 1.) Hella  
> 2.) Pretty sure I had something witty to say here but then forgot it. Ignore the man behind the curtain, etc., etc.  
> 3.) I  
> a.) acknowledge your influence on this work freely, and, to be honest, rather proudly. It's a good work to gain influence from.  
> b.) maybe perhaps sucked up to you a little bit in the writing of subheading 'a.)'.  
> c.) would like to not be sued. Instead, possibly, a small shout-out to me would do. Through the New York Times, perhaps, or other similarly famous and perfectly suitable mediums  
> Thank you!
> 
> (Postscript, aka, the actual notes: notice I tagged this work with 'James', not 'Jim', Moriarty. Gaiman refers to his villain as 'Jack-of-all-Trades', among other things, and I thought that was too clever to change. I mean, that's a pretty perfect anti-superhero name for Moriarty, right? As Jim and Jack are both derivatives of James, I thought I could bend canon a bit. Also, this Jim/Jack character is older than both John and Sherlock, which I will pretend to be a nod to the Arthur Conan Doyle canon but will actually just be a way for me to avoid problematic problem type problems from cropping up in the transition from book to fanfic.)

  There was a darkness; one of many. The static in the darkness was a hand, and the softening-but-not-softening glint to the hand was of a knife.

  The knife's handle was of black bone, polished, and the knife's blade had the soft-but-not-soft flexibility and steel, purity and contradiction, of a razor. It would melt and part, all with one blow. And it was sharper and finer than pain itself; for entire clear moments after its incision, all that would be felt was a dull-but-sharp numbness. A less-than-nothing.

  The man was the same.

  He, too, was a negative; his hair was dark and his eyes were dark and his shirt was a bright reflection of the moon to the dark cashmere of his suit. His shoes were polished to such a lambency that they, too, reflected the moon. He carried this false moon on his clothing, but unlike its sincerity in the sky, there was no man to be seen in its craters and folds.

  This true moon, this sincerity-in-the-sky, shone through the window (which in turn lay in the wall of a room - nursery - in a house. Just a house, almost a home, somewhat opulent but not opulently so. Not particularly particular, yet without becoming noticeably unnoticeable). It was not much light, but the man (truly more of a boy) had no need for excess. He could sense more than see the shape of the child in the crib with the high-slatted sides as another negative in the darkness. He could smell it as a hint of milkiness and plastic. And he could feel knife, how it had done almost everything it had been brought to that house to do. He could feel its wetness.

  The hand - raised smoothly, aim for the chest, brace, move, swipe - and then seizing, and then... lowering. A few drops of blood had fallen into the crib, something he had tried to be careful of, an attempt to avoid the noise of a woken baby, but there was no baby to wake. Instead, a brown, vaguely humanoid lump. A teddy bear. That negative shape he had sensed in the darkness. It was all of those things, but it was not the child.

  There was still not much light, and, true, he still did not need much, but now he used it. He could see more clearly all that he had dismissed as irrelevant before. He found it still so.

  He could focus and smell more clearly the hint of milkiness and plasticity of a baby but the scent led nowhere and helped him only to realize that the child had been here once and was here no more. And he could still feel the knife, and its wetness, and how it had done almost (almost _almost)_ everything that it had been brought to that house to do.


End file.
